Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English modernist novelist and essayist, author of Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own, and co-founder of the Hogarth Press.

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at Hyde Park Gate, London, she was educated largely at home. After her father's death in 1904 she moved to Bloomsbury and became a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published by Duckworth on 26 March 1915.

In 1917 the Woolfs bought a hand press and began printing at Hogarth House in Richmond; the Hogarth Press's first publication was Two Stories (July 1917). The press went on to publish most of her work, including Mrs Dalloway (14 May 1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One's Own (1929), The Waves (1931) and Three Guineas (1938). She was among the pioneers of stream-of-consciousness narration. She died by drowning in the River Ouse near her Sussex home on 28 March 1941.

For collectors

Hogarth Press first editions of her novels are the core of a Woolf collection, and the dust jackets are part of each book's identity because her sister Vanessa Bell designed the jackets for all of Woolf's Hogarth books; the 1925 Mrs Dalloway jacket is a well-known example. The Duckworth first edition of The Voyage Out (1915) predates the press. Two Stories (1917), hand-printed by the Woolfs, was the press's first publication.